


without the sweet the sour wouldn't taste

by amaura



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Phil Suffers, Pining, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 14:44:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17582840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaura/pseuds/amaura
Summary: “This is going to be great,” Jér says, and he’s leaning into Phil, his mouth close enough to Phil’s ear for him to feel Jér breathe against his neck.Phil looks at him, confused. He’s still smiling, and he loves how easily Jér smiles back. “What is?”“You and me,” Jér says.And that’s how it starts.(Or: Phil bonds with Jér in his last year in the Q.)





	without the sweet the sour wouldn't taste

**Author's Note:**

  * For [love_stella](https://archiveofourown.org/users/love_stella/gifts).



> This has been so long in the works, but it's finally here and it was so fun to write this for you, Ash! One day, I'll stop writing soft boys in Love but today is not that day, apparently. This is me stepping out of my comfort zone and writing a pairing I've loved for a while but never wrote, so a special thank you to Ash for being such a wonderful and encouraging person! 
> 
> Thanks to Pan, Ria & Grace for reading this over and for their constant support, to Heather and Aimee for believing in me since the very beginning and to everyone on Twitter for being so amazing! 
> 
> (If 'soft (dumb) boys in love' was a tag that existed, it would sum up this fic pretty well!) 
> 
> Happy reading!

Phil bonds with Jér in his last year in the Q.

They lose in the quarter finals, and as much as it sucks after the season they’ve had, Phil is proud of how far they’ve come. He’s sitting in the locker room, and he’s staring at Jér like he usually does, except this time it feels different. Jér is already staring right back at him and Phil feels his heart jump in his chest.

It doesn’t happen until a few hours later, when they’re sitting in the booth of a crowded bar in Rouyn. Jér is right there and he’s smiling and it’s hard for Phil to focus on anything else. He keeps staring at Jér when he thinks nobody is looking and as soon as Jér turns back to look him, Phil looks away.

Zach is sitting in front of them, eyeing both of them suspiciously. “You’re acting weird,” he says.

Phil shrugs. He doesn’t answer, doesn’t feel like he has to, not anymore. He lets Jér deal with it instead. Jér smiles at his brother, shakes his head and says nothing.

Luckily, Zach forgets about it and starts a conversation with the rest of the table at large, so Phil can go back to staring at the side of Jér’s head.

He’s too busy staring at Jér, while also trying to keep his crush on him a secret when he feels a hand on his own. Phil doesn’t have to look up to know that it’s Jér, and he intertwines their fingers together easily, letting the familiar feeling set in his chest.

He doesn’t let go of Jér’s hand for a while, and things don’t change right away, but they definitely both feel it because when Phil looks up to stare at Jér again, Jér is already looking at him, a lopsided smile pulling at his lips.

“Hey,” he says.

Phil smiles back, because it’s impossible not to. “Hey yourself,” he replies.

Phil’s mom had warned him about soul bonds ever since he was a little kid, but he never really worried about it. At some point, in his second year in Rouyn, when his tiny crush on Jér had become more than what it was, he imagined what it would be like to bond with Jér. He’d hear stories about how, when you bond with your soulmate, it doesn’t take much for you to understand what’s happening.

Kind of like now—how they’re sitting at a table with a bunch of their friends, teammates, but they only have eyes for each other.

It’s common knowledge that you don’t get to pick who you soulbond with. It’s funny, now that Phil thinks about it, that ever since he met Jér, a part of him knew that they’d end up being soul bonded someday. He’s glad to know he was right. 

“This is going to be great,” Jér says, and he’s leaning into Phil, his mouth close enough to Phil’s ear for him to feel Jér breathe against his neck.

Phil looks at him, confused. He’s still smiling, and he loves how easily Jér smiles back. “What is?”

“You and me,” Jér says.

And that’s how it starts.

Phil gets used to spending all of his time being close enough to Jér to feel his emotions in the back of his mind, and then September looms around and they have to pack their bags for their respective training camps.

The first few weeks apart are the hardest. Phil tries his best to focus on training camp instead of focusing on the raging headaches he gets, on and off every few hours. Phil always knew there would be consequences—he’s been told ever since he was a kid that your soulmate is supposed to be your priority, and instead they both chose hockey. He knew things wouldn’t be perfect, but he never thought that he’d go from having Jér with him all day to not having him at all.

There’s a lot of things Phil wants to change about the way he and Jér parted ways at the end of the best summer he’s ever had, but he knows going back in time is impossible. He knows that he can’t tell Jér that had he asked, maybe Phil would’ve given up everything just to be with him—can’t tell Jér that if he had to pick between hockey and him, Jér would be the first choice, every single time.

Training camp is harder than Phil thought, but he gets praise from the coaches and from his teammates, so he thinks he’s been doing better than expected, which is always what you aim for coming into camp.

The thing is, the headaches don’t stop and if they were a minimal distraction at first, they’ve definitely become something too hard to ignore. There’s a sharp pain at the back of Phil’s head—like someone’s willingly taking slap shots at the back of his head when he’s not wearing a helmet or any kind of protection.

When he gets sent down to Lehigh Valley the week before the season starts, he’s not surprised. He’d blame the headaches, but Phil knows that there’s a lot more where that came from. Not only has his head been hurting because of how far apart he and Jér are, he also spends most of his alone time thinking about Jér and about how if things were the way they used to be, they would be sitting on the couch together right now, Phil running a hand through Jér’s hair, trying his best to make the pain go away.

He thinks about how Jér has got to be dealing with the same headaches, too. There’s something about soul bonds that they never tell you in school—no matter how much you love your soulmate, the more distance you put between the two of you, the worst the headaches get. The thing is, Phil didn’t know they could get this bad.

They get worse as the season goes on and Phil feels Jér’s presence in his mind fade. If he can feel Jér at all nowadays, it’s faded and trivial. Sometimes, Phil’s on the couch, watching Jér’s games on his laptop while Nic watches reruns of Friends on the TV and he gets a rush of happiness and he doesn’t get it until he sees it—the look on Jér’s face when his team scores and gets the lead back in the second period.

Other times, though, Phil can’t feel him at all, and he hates it. He hates not knowing how Jér’s doing—hates thinking that this is something he and Jér should be dealing with  _ together _ . Instead, they’re miles apart doing the exact opposite. He feels sad and his head hurts—it doesn’t take a genius to know that these feelings are entirely his own.

Phil’s the one to ask everyone if they want to go out and get a drink. He’s not technically allowed to drink in the U.S. until January, but he drags Nic with him because he knows Nic can. They end up in a crappy bar where Phil doubts they’ll get carded, and they find a booth at the back of the bar where no one’s going to bother them. A few other guys on the team decided to come along, and the booth is packed after everyone sits down.

Phil doesn’t mind the company, but he hopes that the other guys know that this isn’t a social call. He’s close to almost every guy on the team that decided to join them, but Nic’s the only one who knows about his soul bond. Nic’s the only one who’s been around enough to notice that Phil’s been distracted lately—well, ever since he got here, really.

Most of the guys end up getting beer, and Phil’s lost in his thoughts when the bartender comes back, but luckily for him, Nic ordered him something strong enough for him to forget about things for one night.

And, the thing about Nic is that Phil would be completely lost without him. He would probably be lying down in his bed right now, trying to find a way to connect with Jér through the bond even though that hasn’t worked for months. Phil doesn’t want to give up on his bond—knows that it’s almost impossible for a soul bond to break on its own, anyway—but the headaches and the feeling of loss and longing aren’t making it easy for him to want this to go on.  

He downs his drink pretty quickly, and Phil’s not a lightweight, but that drink on top of his headaches makes him feel like he’s tipsy, even after only one drink. He feels like shit and doesn’t even notice when Nic puts another drink in his hand. It’s water, he realizes, because the taste is different from the previous drink and also not as good.

Water makes Phil think of Jér and of the good times they had at the lake during the summer. It’s not something they’d done before—spending the summer together, but they decided to do it. Jér kept saying it would be good for the bond to stay together all summer, because all bonds are weak at the beginning and they grow stronger with time. Phil thought it would be good to spend the summer together for other reasons, but he never said anything, just nodded along with what Jér said because it felt like the right thing to do at the time.

Phil takes his phone out of his pocket and his lock screen is a silly picture of him and Jér from the last day they spent together. It shouldn’t have so much meaning, but it does, and he keeps pressing on the button on the side of his phone every time the picture fades. He unlocks his phone and almost on instinct, he goes to call Jér before stopping himself.

Phil hasn’t talked to Jér in weeks and he doesn’t want their first conversation since then to happen while he’s drunk. He wants to talk to Jér, though—wants to tell him everything about how he’s been feeling for the past few weeks. He doubts Jér’s been able to feel any of his emotions, either, but maybe now isn’t the best time to talk about that.

Phil knows that the headaches are probably as bad for Jér as they are for him, but there’s a part of him that wants to ask anyway, a part of him that wants to know how Jér’s doing. He wants to say a lot of things that he knows he’s going to regret saying, so he opts for a text instead.

It’s nothing much, just something small like _i wish you were here_ , and he makes the effort to send it in French, because he knows Jér’s going to appreciate that.

He asks Nic to take him back to their place before it goes any further than that. He went out to drink so he could forget about the part of him that misses Jér so much that it’s like missing a limb, or the part of him that loves Jér and wishes Jér stopped pretending like their soul bond was just a platonic bond.

Instead, he’s thinking about Jér more than he has in the past few weeks and his head is pounding. Phil wishes he knew whether it was because of the bond, or because of the vodka tonics he drank. He’s pretty sure it’s a mix of both.

 

Things get better after that for a few weeks, until Phil takes a hard fall. The headaches are gone—they’ve been gone for a week, and as much as Phil complained about them in the beginning, he’s worried something happened to the bond when they just disappear completely overnight. Phil spends a whole night on the internet looking at different websites and blogs to know more about the reason  _ why _ the headaches stopped, and he doesn’t find much aside from people saying how important it is not to put distance between you and your bond mate. Nothing Phil doesn’t already know, anyway.

What worries him is that one day, he felt like his head was going to explode and the next day, he felt nothing—he felt numb, like a part of him was gone and he couldn’t get it back.

Then, the headaches come back but they feel different. He goes to the team doctor after the game, to tell him about the new headaches he feels on the side of his head. It doesn’t take the doctor too long to figure out what the headaches are. He says it’s not a concussion and that Phil is lucky it’s nothing more than just a temporary pain in his neck because of how he fell. Before leaving, he asks if Phil has anything else he wants to tell him, and when Phil shrugs and shakes his head, he sends Phil home with an ice pack and tells him to rest.

He does that for the first few days. He gets bored of staying in bed while Nic goes out to practice and to lunch with the guys on the team. He pretends not to mind, but Nic knows him better than that. He tries his best to hang out with Phil as long as he can, and when he has to leave for a few days because of the Phantoms’ road trip, Phil tells him he’s going to be fine.

He doesn’t know who he’s trying to convince the most—Nic, or himself.

The first day goes by without any real problems. Phil spends most of it sleeping, and he goes for a walk just to breathe some fresh air and feel the cold air on his skin. Getting out of the apartment is good—Phil doesn’t get to do much but walking around the city without having to worry about anything feels nice.

Things are good until he gets home and starts thinking about Jér. He had been good in the past few days—not letting himself think about Jér too much, about how much he wishes he could see him. Realistically, Phil could take his phone out of his pocket, text Jér and ask him if he wants to Facetime, but the team doctor was pretty strict about limiting—if not avoiding—any screen time at all for the first few days.

So, it’s only logical that Phil packs an overnight bag with comfortable clothes, toiletries and a phone charger before calling an Uber that takes him straight to the airport. It’s impulsive and irrational and Phil doesn’t know what made him decide that he  _ had _ to see Jér, but the Uber driver is rounding the corner of the parking lot at the Philadelphia airport and Phil has no desire at all to ask him to turn back.

It’s like this—Phil knows that their bond is nothing but a platonic bond to Jér. He knows that and the world seems akin to remind him of that fact almost every day. He keeps thinking about how Forts had said something about how obvious it was that their bond was more than just a platonic bond during the summer when they’d decided to have all the ex-Huskies back together one last time before parting ways for the AHL or the NHL.

Sure, Phil’s always loved the idea of having a soulmate. He’s always loved the idea of having that one person that understands you like no one else can, even if the bond is strictly platonic. But there’s something about him and Jér—about what they have, that just seems to be  _ more _ than platonic, Phil’s feelings for Jér notwithstanding.

So, he finds himself on the next flight to Providence within a few hours and the urge to tell Jér about his arrival grows stronger the closer he gets, but Phil holds his end and keeps his phone on airplane mode for the entire duration of the flight.

The moment he lands in Providence, he starts feeling the same way he had in the summer. He can feel Jér again—can feel like Jér’s a part of him again, and Phil can’t help the smile on his face as he bypasses baggage claim and heads straight to the taxi area. While he waits, he thinks about how Jér must be feeling it too, the feeling of joy and happiness that Phil is pretty sure has never been this strong.

It only makes him smile wider.

The drive to Jér’s place is relatively short and Phil gets there in no time. He doesn’t get a lot of time to figure out what he’s gonna tell Jér when he knocks on the door and sees Jér standing on the other side. He doesn’t go over the specifics—figures he’ll wing it and say whatever crosses his mind when he sees Jér for the first time in a few months.

The car comes to a stop and Phil is nervous. He doesn’t know why but walking up the few steps to Jér’s building before letting himself in with the code he easily memorized gives Phil pause and he actually has to stop before pressing the button for the elevator, because the idea of coming all the way to Providence to see Jér seemed unrealistic at first but he’s here now, because he can. He’d be playing hockey with his teammates right now, if it wasn’t for his injury and seeing Jér—well, that’s better than hockey.

To Phil, anyway.  

He’s standing on the doorstep, about to knock when he feels Jér through the bond. He’s confused but also relieved, Phil thinks. He knocks on the door with a smile on his face, and that smile doesn’t fade when Jér opens the door and smiles right back at him. It’s so much—so many emotions being passed back and forth through the bond, all at once—and Phil is so overwhelmed by everything that he doesn’t even realize that Jér is pulling him into a hug.

“Hey,” he says, right in Phil’s ear. Phil can feel how happy Jér is to see him through the bond and he can also tell by the way Jér is holding onto him so tight. “How—You’re here.”

Phil smiles. “I’m here,” he says, and for a moment he’s sure that it’s love he’s feeling through the bond, but he doesn’t let himself think about it too much. “It’s so good to see you.”

“I looked at the schedule last night and I’m pretty sure your team has a game in, like, an hour,” Jér says.

Phil nods. “I’m on bed rest. Well, I was. Doctor’s orders.”

“You don’t look hurt—hold on, the headaches,” Jér says, “that was you?”

Phil grimaces. He knows Jér usually feels everything he feels, but he didn’t think the headaches would affect him, after being apart for so long. The thought crossed his mind a few times, but after not hearing from Jér after it happened, Phil told himself it must not have been strong enough to affect him. He hates that he was wrong. He hates that Jér didn’t reach out to him even more, though.

“I’m sorry,” he says, quickly. “I don’t remember much about what happened but—”

“You don’t have to apologize for this,” Jér interrupts. “You’re, like, crazy for being here after a hit like that, but I’m so glad to see you.”

They move to the couch, where Jér was watching a French series before Phil knocked on the door. They sit in companionable silence, and Phil doesn’t have to think too hard to know that even though Jér meant it when he said he was glad to see Phil, he doesn’t know the real reason why Phil’s here. To be fair, Phil’s not sure he knows either.

Sure, there’s a part of him that wanted to know if Jér was okay, especially after the headaches stopped abruptly. There’s also a part of him that’s still trying to convince Jér that their bond is more than what it seems—more than just a platonic bond. He’s running out of ways to prove that to him and even though most bonds between friends are platonic, Phil’s gut is telling him that theirs is different. Phil’s gut is rarely wrong.

Phil knows that in terms of big gestures, getting on a plane to go see your bond mate when he’s hours away might be a little excessive for a platonic bond. He just wishes Jér would notice that Phil’s going out of his way to get Jér to notice him and realize that maybe he’s always loved Phil.

“As much as I’m happy to have you here,” Jér starts, “why did you come? Is everything okay?”

Phil sighs. “Everything’s fine. I just—missed you and wanted to see you,” he says, instead of saying he wanted to make sure Jér was okay, after what happened. “Being apart isn’t good for the bond, but we knew that. And I know we said we’d try and see each other before Christmas, but you—we haven’t talked since the summer.”

Jér’s never been uncomfortable talking about the bond before, but the feelings he’s sending through the bond seem to be telling a different story. Phil sits there awkwardly, and things are weird—weirder than they’ve ever been and as much as Phil loves Jér, he almost wants to stand up and leave so that things stop being awkward.

Jér must feel that because he puts a hand on Phil’s wrist to ground him. Phil doesn’t move.

“I wasn’t gonna tell you, because I didn’t want you to worry, but the first few weeks were rough. It took everything in me not to call you and tell you we couldn’t keep living like this, but—this is what we’ve always dreamed of doing. We’re so close to the NHL that it feels so dumb to give up now.”

“Yeah,” Phil says.

“There are a lot of players that have platonic bonds and they still play hockey. If they can make theirs work, why can’t we?” Jér says.

Phil doesn’t sigh, despite how much he wants to. He wants to say something like  _ because ours isn’t platonic _ and  _ because platonic bonds are different,  _ but he doesn’t have the energy to have this argument with Jér again, so he stays quiet.

Everyone knows platonic bonds and romantic bonds don’t work the same way. All bonds are different and manifest themselves in various ways, but there’s something specific to platonic bonds and romantic bonds that Jér seems to forget. Romantic bonds are stronger, and distance hurts romantic bonds more than it does platonic ones. Phil remembers his mom telling him about how she and his dad bonded—he remembers her saying that there’s nothing like it and that she knew it was romantic because she felt some kind of spark that wasn’t there before.

Even if that’s not what happened for Phil because he was already in love with Jér before they soul bonded, he’s never felt anything like this before. He’d had a girlfriend in high school, and no one forgets their first love, but even that wasn’t as big and significant as what he’d felt that night he and Jér bonded back in Rouyn.

“We can make it work,” Phil says, moments later. “We just—our bond is so new that it wouldn’t make sense for things to be perfect right away. I’m sure things weren’t easy for everyone the first few months they spend apart after soul bonding. We’ll be okay.”

Jér’s the one who smiles this time. “We’ll be okay.”

 

Phil wakes up hours later, confused. He takes a quick look around, trying to recognize his surroundings, and it’s only after blinking a few times that he remembers he’s in Providence—in Jér’s apartment. Jér is nowhere to be seen but it looks like it’s pretty late, so he probably went to sleep in his bed. There’s a pillow propped under his head and another one on the other side of his neck. Phil notices that Jér was really careful to make sure nothing happened to his head again, and that feeling alone makes him smile.     
  
  


Phil goes back home the next morning. He wakes up refreshed and well rested. It’s fair to say that was the best sleep he’s had in a while. He leaves when Jér has to go to practice—Phil hugs him tight and doesn’t miss the way his heart skips a beat when he feels a wave of feelings from Jér through the bond.

Phil leaves Providence with the promise of texting Jér as soon as he gets back. He only gets back to his apartment in the middle of the afternoon, but he takes a minute to text Jér and let him know he got home safely, smiling to himself when he gets a few smiley face emojis in return.    
  
He’s barely dropped his bag by the door, when Nic comes out of his room and he looks surprised.    
  
“You okay?” he asks, looking at Phil with a worrisome look in his eyes. “I got back from practice and you were gone. I thought the doctor said you were supposed to stay in bed?”    
  
Phil wants to joke, wants to say something like _hi nic im good how are you_ but it doesn’t feel like the right moment to crack jokes, not when Nic looks like he’s relieved to see Phil. It takes a moment for Phil to realize that he forgot to tell Nic he was leaving. He didn’t tell anyone he was leaving—didn’t tell Jér he was going to visit him out of the blue because there wasn’t much thought process when he decided to fly out of state.    
  
“I’m good,” Phil says, in lieu of giving Nic any kind of explanation. He figures Nic’s going to have a bunch of questions anyway, so he doesn’t give him much more than that.    
  
Nic walks over to him and pulls him into an embrace that Phil lets himself enjoy for the few seconds it lasts. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he says, pulling back. “So, where did you go?”    
  
Phil takes a long, deep breath. He should’ve planned this better—should’ve texted Nic before leaving to avoid this conversation altogether, but that’s all in the past and there’s nothing he can do about it.    
  
“I was worried about Jér because of my, y’know,” he says, pointing to his head. “So, I went to his place to see if he was okay. It turns out he was okay, so we talked and fell asleep and then I flew back here.”    
  
Nic’s reaction is nothing like what Phil had pictured in his head before having this conversation. He smiles, and bumps his shoulder into Phil’s, laughing. “You went all the way to Providence to check on your boyfriend even though you guys haven’t talked in months?”    
  
“He’s not my boyfriend. He’s my bond mate.”    
  
“Details, dude. Doesn’t change the fact that you want him to be your boyfriend,” Nic says, and Phil flushes. He’s not wrong, but, like, Phil wishes it was that easy. He wishes that wanting more from his bond with Jér was enough to make Jér realize that their bond is more romantic than he thinks.    
  
Phil guesses he always likes a challenge, but this is proving to be harder than he planned. He walks to the couch because the headaches are slowly coming back.    
  
“Bad headache?” Nic says.    
  
Phil nods. “Yeah—it’s not usually this bad.”    
  
Nic nods, knowingly.    
  
Phil knows his injury headaches are different than the ones he gets when he’s away from Jér, but his head hurts so much that he’s pretty sure it’s a mix of both.    
  
He’s got his phone brightness to the lowest setting, and he even went through the trouble of lowering the white point so that his screen is darker just so he could text Jér even when his headaches are so bad he can’t see straight. Phil closes his eyes for a moment, and he feels his phone vibrate in his hand a second later, with a text from Jér.    
  
_ this is worse than before, _ it says. Phil hates how fast his brain translates that to i miss you.    
  
Another text comes in before he gets to reply.    
_   
_ __ this is not me telling you to hop on another flight    
  
Phil laughs and sends a bunch of grumpy emojis with a red heart. 

  
He closes his eyes again, and then his phone rings because Jér’s calling him. Phil picks up on the first ring.    
  
“Hey,” Phil says, though it comes out muffled and more like a grunt than anything else.    
  
“Hey,” Jér says, and Phil can’t feel his emotions at all, not from this far away, but a smile easily stretches on his lips when he hears the softness and the fondness in Jér’s voice. “So much for listening to what the doctor said, eh?”    
  
“He didn’t say ‘no phones’,” Phil protests. “Besides, it’s not like a doctor would stop me from wanting to call you and see how you’re doing.”    
  
“Yeah, I know that now,” Jér says, laughing a little. “You know, you coming here made me think of something.”    
  
Phil smiles to himself, because he knows exactly where this is going. “Yeah?”    
  
“Do you remember when we bonded, in Rouyn?”    
  
Phil nods, before realizing Jér can’t see him, and his brain is instantly flooded with memories of that night. Memories of Jér grabbing his hand with promises of how great they would be together now that they were closer than they’d ever been. Literally.    
  
“Of course I do,” he says. “I might’ve hit my head, but I’m not about to forget something like this.”    
  
It makes Jér laugh and Phil laughs, too.    
  
“The guys kept teasing us about it and about how it might be possible that it was more than just a regular bond. I remember Zach teasing me about it for months—he still does—and I kept denying it when you said it was more than a regular bond, but deep down I knew it wasn’t.”    
  
He pauses and Phil can hear him breathe through the phone and as weird as it sounds, Jér’s silence on the other end of the line is soothing.    
  
“You—You’re my best friend and at first when we bonded, I kept thinking about you in ways I had never before and I kept blaming the bond for making me feel things about you that I’d never felt before but it took you coming to Providence for me to realize that maybe the feelings were always there and that us soul bonding was all it took to make the feelings come out,” Jér says.    
  
“I love you too,” Phil says, quickly. He flushes when he realizes how fast he said it, but it’s been true for so long that he figures he’s allowed to say it. Phil doesn’t expect to hear it back, especially since it took this long for Jér to figure it out, but he likes that it’s out there now and that Jér just knows everything.    
  
Jér is quiet on the other end, for a second. Phil doesn’t see him, but he can tell Jér is smiling. He feels a sudden wave of happiness and love through the bond and his eyes widen, because he didn’t think that was possible, not when Jér’s miles away.    
  
“Did you feel that?” Jér says.    
  
“You—how is that even possible? You’re not here, are you?” Phil says, and he’s almost ready to get up and run down the stairs but— 

  
Jér laughs. “I’m not in Philly, no. I’m just—when I think about it really hard, sometimes I can feel what you’re feeling. And I didn’t think it was possible until just now, either.”     
  
“You must really love me, then, because that was really strong,” Phil says.    
  
“Yeah, well,” Jér says, and Phil can imagine him shrugging.    
  
They hang up a few minutes later and Phil is still smiling because he can’t help it. He gets a text from Nic that says  _ is the love fest over? i want food _ and that just makes him smile even more.    
  
Phil thinks about everything—about how he doesn’t have to worry about the little things anymore because things with Jér are going well and they can only get better. Sure, Phil’s not going to see Jér until they play each other in January, but until then, he knows things are going to be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you got this far, I'd love to hear which part you liked! Let me know in the comments and kudos are appreciated too!


End file.
